I just tried kmttg on my Tivo HD after being unhappy with Tivo Desktop plus in encoding for my mobile phone. I set up a profile that has great image quality but the audio is a second or two out of sync.
It is my understanding that the only way to fix this is to buy VideoRedo for $50+. Is this correct? Is there another process that will let me automatically download from my Tivo and encode using a custom encoding profile which does not require additional commercial software?

Some have been able to avoid A/V sync issues without using VideoRedo QSfix by using one of the Hanbrake encoding profiles (hb_*) instead of ffmpeg ones (ff_*).

Started having a problem with kmttg last few days. When copying a program from my Tivo to my computer it stops at about the halfway mark.

I'm running Win 7 and kmttg v0p7k. I tried installing the latest ver of Java tonight but that didn't solve the problem. Thanks for any help.

Most likely an issue on TiVo server side perhaps due to glitch in a recording at specific times. Try downloading that show using a web browser (copy the URL kmttg shows in the message window and paste in your web browser and when prompted use tivo for login and your 10 digit MAK as password). If that also fails then there really is not much you can do short of trying to record that episode again on your TiVo.
(TiVo goes through a CPU intensive decrypt, demux, remux and re-encrypt cycle during TTG transfer that sometimes fails when there are glitches in the recording and in those cases no TTG client can get around the problem).

Great, thanks. I think I've found the problem. I recently downgraded my bandwidth with my ISP and while transferring the files thru kmttg from my tivo I was also downloading torrents from various websites, which were using a lot of my available bandwidth and I think that was the problem. I just transferred a file using kmttg, w/o any other simultaneous downloads going, and it worked fine. Does that make sense?

How much bandwidth you're getting from your ISP isn't relevant, unless your TiVo and your PC are in different houses or something. Normally, that would be a transfer over the LAN, not involving your ISP at all. The torrents could run at full blast, and would still only subtract a portion of your LAN bandwidth (depending on your connection type, etc.).

...Of course there are other issues beyond raw bandwidth. Torrents are pretty demanding, and can mess with some routers, due to the sheer number of connections.

There could be a lot of disk activity as well, if the swarm was fairly big. Writes from kmttg download on one portion of the disk, writes from torrent peers/seeds on another portion, and reads from torrent peers/leechers from yet another portion.

I have used Kmttg to try and remove commercials automatically, but it still leaves some commercials. Is there a special way to set it up to get all the commercials? Thanks!!

Usually what it uses to look for commercials is the search for the 2+ seconds of black/blank frames to indicate the start/end of the commercials, but sometimes there are less then the 2 seconds so it ignores those. Sometimes the 2+ seconds are followed by actual parts of the show, so you may have missed those parts if you let it do the cutting automatically.

Usually what it uses to look for commercials is the search for the 2+ seconds of black/blank frames to indicate the start/end of the commercials, but sometimes there are less then the 2 seconds so it ignores those. Sometimes the 2+ seconds are followed by actual parts of the show, so you may have missed those parts if you let it do the cutting automatically.

Actually, I believe the indicator that comskip weights more heavily is the presence (or absence) of a channel logo. kmttg allows the use of individual comskip.ini files, customized to a specific show's characteristics. I've had some success using different comskip.ini files (specifically, I increased the "max_commercial_size" parameter to account for a 3-4 minute Dish commercial that airs during Star Trek: TNG), but I've never been able to customize a comskip.ini file to successfully keep the last 30 second snippets of shows like The Office, 30 Rock or Community, despite the presence of "always_keep_last_seconds". I've noticed those snippets don't include a channel logo, which may be influencing comskip.

It would be nice for me to offer some of my customized comskip.ini files, but I don't think they'd be "universal" enough to work in every environment.

It's also a tedious process to test changes. In the past, I've downloaded and decrypted shows using kmttg, and stopped the kmttg process there. I then used comskip "standalone" with the various changes to it's ini file, and either run it through VideoReDo, or looked at the output files created by comskip (.VPrj? .edl?). Some tweaks I've made rendered comskip completely ineffective with no commercials cut at all. Others tweaks cut too much. With time and patience, I'm pretty sure comskip can be fine tuned to account for most if not all commercial breaks for a show. Although I might have the time, I don't really have the patience, so I live with a "good enough" setup.

This will let you use ShowAnalyzer with anything that is hardcoded to use ComSkip. Just replace comskip.exe with this file and it will run ShowAnalyzer on the file instead. For aware applications, it will comskip.exe will stay alive until ShowAnalyzer is finished.

This looks like a great way to test out ShowAnalyzer without any program changes to kmttg.

That's not an error message - that's part of the curl command being used for downloading (though you did not post the http part of it). The cookie file is simply a temporary unique file name used for each run so it's normal to change every time. There must be some other error messages being shown along with an exit status of some sort. i.e. post the whole error message that shows up in red in message window.

That's not an error message - that's part of the curl command being used for downloading (though you did not post the http part of it). The cookie file is simply a temporary unique file name used for each run so it's normal to change every time. There must be some other error messages being shown along with an exit status of some sort. i.e. post the whole error message that shows up in red in message window.

As I recall, that was the only thing there. The transfer just stops and shows a very low bit-rate. I changed the configuration to use Java instead of Curl, and had better success.

In the past I had no luck for a while with curl at all under Windows 7.
This forum has helped me out and finally I believe that this problem others as well are seeing triggered to implement the option "use java for download".

Now since I have switched to almost every show being in HD my downloads frequently stall again - with either java or curl.
1) The TIVO Series 3 I have is not very reliable in its web serving
2) kmttg does not time out during .TiVo downloads. That stalls the entire kmttg service and it would be great if a monitor could be implemented to terminate stuck downloads and queue them for another try after the next download has completed.

I have monitored my auto.log.0 file with a Perl script last night and the download of one show was stuck from 2am to 10am this morning. Then I restarted kmttg service but this is not very graceful and leaves files which are then not removable anymore (Windows permissions) - just a pain.

To investigate further I currently only download and decrypt files and I get the feeling that the Tivo serves download better during the day than at night when its load is higher during recording. As I read here the TIVO's performance is not very high for transcoding recordings for downloads.

Note: Even when downloads work some 1hour HD episodes take ~2hours with ~ 1Mbyte/sec (8MBps) give and take. This is not impressive.

If I add just one file to the queue it downlads fine. If I add multiple files it deletes all but the last one after its downlads.

I did re-install java prior to this problem. Is this a java issue? has anyone had this issue?

I have all profiles removed and just download the tivo file to offload storage space. my only selection is the meta data.

Thanks.

There is no "delete .tivo file after download" option. If all you have checked is "metadata" task then a download and metadata file generation is all that runs, no deletes are in effect regardless of option settings. So short of the downloads failing for some reason they should not get deleted. Queue up a couple of files and let them run through and then post the entire contents of the kmttg message window. It should be pretty obvious from that what is happening.
Only other thing I can think of is if you have set the File Naming setting such that each show does not get a unique file name relative to other shows then possibly the shows are overwriting each other if you have Overwrite existing files option set, or not downloading at all if you have that option disabled.

That command was documented in HMO documentation (back when TiVo actually still had a web site with such information) but it most likely doesn't do anything useful, though the TiVo web server does accept the command.

I don't know what to tell you about stalled and/or slow downloads. With both my S3 OLED and Premiere units I've never had those kinds of issues (downloading from various OSs including XP, Vista 64, Win 7 64 and Linux) so I do not have conditions to debug anything along those lines. Apparently the web servers in THD units are more prone to having those issues perhaps because they are too underpowered. If you are getting very slow transfers and/or stalls I would check the more obvious things you have control over such as:
* Your network connections (wired is always better than wireless)
* Firewall and antivirus software, especially Kaspersky and the like can cause issues.

As to the Reset Web Server. I sometimes use it but have no clue if it actually re-enabled transfer of it the server just revived its functionality over night on its own.

As to the stalled downloads: I made an experiment today in only downloading and decrypting 31 episodes of one show in SD quality. 22 of these 31 downloads have already completed w/o hickup while the Tivo did not record anything this afternoon. The test actually uses c:\cygwin\bin\curl.exe insteda of the 'java option' for download. Either SD or being 'idle' seems to help.

My next test will be to run only HD shows and see how this goes before I re-enable the qsfix, adscan and adcut again. I noticed that some VideoRedo3.exe tasks stay alive when I restart the service. Is it possible that kmttg does not purge some of its processes like:
cmd.exe /c ... VB script ...
when net stop kmttg is called ?

BTW: I am using Win 7 , connect Tivo and and Acer Revo via a 100MBit switch of a Buffalo router. Windows runs AVG and its own firewall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by moyekj

Most likely nothing useful. It executes following url:

Code:

http://<tivoip>/TiVoConnect?Command=ResetServer

That command was documented in HMO documentation (back when TiVo actually still had a web site with such information) but it most likely doesn't do anything useful.

I don't know what to tell you about stalled downloads. With both my S3 OLED and Premiere units I've never had those kinds of issues so I do not have conditions to debug anything along those lines. Apparently the web servers in THD units are more prone to having those issues perhaps because they are too underpowered. If you are getting very slow transfers and/or stalls the only thing I would check are things you have control over such as:
* Your network connections (wired is always better than wireless)
* Firewall and antivirus software, especially Kaspersky and the like can cause issues.

My next test will be to run only HD shows and see how this goes before I re-enable the qsfix, adscan and adcut again. I noticed that some VideoRedo3.exe tasks stay alive when I restart the service. Is it possible that kmttg does not purge some of its processes like:

For something like VideoRedo note that is is really a 2 level deep command: a call to cscript which in turn initiates VideoRedo COM jobs. So by killing cscript alone this does not kill VideoRedo. For recent kmttg releases I use a scheme for the various VideoRedo scripts which monitors the presence of a file while it's running such that if the file is no longer present then VideoRedo exits. i.e. To kill a VideoRedo job it simply means deleting a file which causes VideoRedo and cscript jobs to exit. That's what happens under controlled circumstances. When shutting down service it may not be gracefully calling all appropriate kill procedures such as the above. In any case that should not be affecting downloads.

The fact that your SD downloads work very well and your trouble is with HD downloads does seem to point the finger at the TiVo having trouble doing it's conversions properly for TTG transfers - either glitches in the stream or too big of a load for processor to handle (since HD files obviously involve more processing than SD files on TiVo side).